


M.

by reckonedrightly



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Death, F/M, Family, Grief/Mourning, Post-Series Three, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-06 22:34:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/740916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reckonedrightly/pseuds/reckonedrightly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary gives a dry little laugh which seems to scrape her throat on the way out. She tosses her head and draws herself up amongst the books. She’s very, very beautiful, and not tragically so; no pretty pink-swollen eyelids for Mary, and no glittering tear tracks. Her beauty sits in the heart of her like a stone, rock solid and sunk deep. “Everyone seems to think I’m made of glass these days.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	M.

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the S3 Christmas special.

Above them, the church ceiling arches like a pretense of heaven. They sit on the same pew with a good deal of space between them, each dressed in inky black. For the moment, everything is silent, and Edith is glad for it. She thinks they should try to avoid talking. If they talk they will inevitably argue, and it isn’t seemly to argue in a church.

Mary, as ever, disagrees. “Do you believe in God?” she asks, as calmly as if she were inquiring about the weather, staring at the altar with her black-gloved hands knotted tightly in her lap.

“I suppose so.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“I don’t see any reason why you should.”

“That’s a fence-sitting answer. I thought you wrote for a newspaper.”

“Why should that mean I know what to say, Mary?”

“One does feel a journalist ought to have opinions about these things.”

“It’s probably crude to be opinionated at a funeral.”

“The funeral’s over now. I wish you’d told me he was in a better place, you know. No, don’t open your mouth. I don’t care to hear it now that I’ve told you it’s what I want to hear.”

Silence. Eventually, Mary gets up, straightens her dress, and clicks neatly out of the church, leaving Edith on her own to wonder why she said _I suppose so_ when she meant _I don’t know_.

The thought circles and flits about and nearly slips out of her grasp. When that happens, when it nearly floats away from her, pushed away by a brief worry about whether she will fit into her mauve mourning dress and the hope that Mother isn’t going to take all this too badly, she shoots up from the pew and strides out as fast as she can, up to the house and up to her room so that she can install herself behind her desk, snatch up a pen and scrawl, in a truly awful hand: _I lie; do you?_

Then she pants a little, and frowns, and shakes her head. A few days later, she comes back and devotes some time to slowly discovering what she’s talking about.

*

“I’m not sure it fits the usual tone of your column,” Michael says.

“No,” Edith replies, “it’s not meant to. I know we can’t publish it in the paper. But I thought you might like to read it. Or—I suppose I liked the idea of you reading it. I thought it might make me feel better, if someone read it.”

“It’s very good, you know.”

Edith smiles. The flush of pleasure that comes to her cheeks isn't false, but it fades quickly, leaving her quietly fussing with her tea. She is glad that it’s very good; or at least that he has said that it’s very good; but that isn’t why she came down to London with the pages hidden in her bag, blazing there like stolen jewels.

The pages in front of him look very small and crumpled suddenly. She knows that there’s a coffee-stain on the second-to-last one and berates herself for not writing it out in best; surely people who write seriously (not novelists, she’s not a novelist, she can’t invent; she’s a journalist, that’s all, she writes about what she sees) don’t leave coffee stains on things? 

“Very good,” Michael muses again, and again Edith feels that flushed pride that doesn’t fill her up.

“Do you understand it?” she says suddenly. He looks at her with some surprise, and she goes a mortified red, half-laughing; “Oh, no, not that I—I’m sure you can read it perfectly well. It’s not terribly complex, I mean I don’t think I consulted a dictionary once, I just rather went for it while I still wanted to write it. I mean, does it...” But she trails off, because she doesn’t know what words can pin down her meaning. Perhaps she should have consulted a dictionary before she caught the train down.

“I think I understand it, my dear,” Michael says eventually, giving her a curious look. “Yes, I think I understand it very well.”

“Alright.” She hesitates. “What’s it about, then?”

Michael laughs, and Edith rolls her eyes, her mouth stumbling upwards in an embarrassed smile. “It’s about the truth,” he says, “in a world which thinks the truth is vulgar. And it’s about you. I’ve never read anything you’ve written about yourself. It’s extraordinary, it really is. And now, you see, I’ve got to ask if you’re alright.”

“Oh, yes,” said Edith. “Yes, I’m perfectly fine.” But that’s not true. That’s just what she’s supposed to say, and she can see, from how Michael’s eyes dim, that he knows that as well as she does. She licks her lips, and tries, “That’s, I mean. Oh, I mean it’s been awful, but it’s...the thing is, you see, these awful things happen, but someone is always closer to the blast than I am. I can’t possibly say I’m upset when Mary’s lost a—a part of herself. You should see her. Well, no, you shouldn’t, she’d hate that. She’s quarantining herself from the outside world at the moment.”

“Does that mean you can’t be upset?”

“In my book, yes.”

Michael asks to keep what she’s written, offering to show it to some other people, friends of his who are—and here he smiles—even more understanding than he is. Edith says no. She wants to take it back up to Downton, to work on it there; no, she says with some surprise when he asks; no, it’s not even close to finished.

*

Writing like this is like sculpting, she discovers. One has to chip away at it slowly. Edith isn’t sure she’s creating anything; it feels more like she’s just refining what has always been there, waiting to be put down on paper.

There’s an awful lot of crossing out to do. And there’s an awful lot she can’t do when there’s someone else in the room.

“Whatever do you do, locked up in here?” Mary demands.

“I write, of course. I’m a journalist; I ought to have opinions.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, must you quote me back at myself? I don’t remember half the things I say. I’m sure I contradict myself all the time.” 

Edith has heard of widows wandering through their houses like shadows, worn thin by the loss of their husbands, until, it seems, they just go transparent one day and no one receives another polite letter from them turning down an invitation; no one sees them ghosting about their gardens; no one notices them vanish. Mary refuses to be so retiring. She clicks sharply and restlessly about the rooms of Downton, viciously glossy in her grief, and looking into her face these days requires one to take a deep breath first in order to compose oneself.

She’s in the room Edith has adopted as her study, which still smells a little of being closed-up but which Edith loves because it’s hers. She looks out of place beside the bookshelves; Edith has never seen Mary look out of place inside the house before. 

“It stuck in my mind, that’s all,” Edith says, in the conciliatory tone she keeps adopting towards Mary these days, which she rather despises herself for.

“Good grief,” says Mary. She hasn’t lost anything since Matthew died—except from a husband, obviously. If anything, her strange, blazing coldness has only intensified. She’s hard to look at. Her eyes are like wounds and her mouth is tight with fury. Some of that goes away when she speaks, which is why Edith is, for the first time in her life, almost glad to talk to her. “No one seems to want to pick a fight with me lately.”

Edith nearly breaks her pen. She has been trying to be kind, for God’s sake. “I’m sure you’re devastated,” she says.

Mary gives a dry little laugh which seems to scrape her throat on the way out. She tosses her head and draws herself up amongst the books. She’s very, very beautiful, and not tragically so; no pretty pink-swollen eyelids for Mary, and no glittering tear tracks. Her beauty sits in the heart of her like a stone, rock solid and sunk deep. “Everyone seems to think I’m made of glass these days.”

“Not me.”

“No. You think I’m made of ice.”

“I don’t think that either, actually.” Edith’s tone is getting tight. She knows it’s not fair, but Mary is impossible now, even more than she used to be, and all Edith wants to do is write but she can feel her inspiration getting cloyed by her anger and secret grief. She keeps her eyes trained on the paper in front of her and not her sister. “Whatever you want to believe, whatever you want to think other people think, we’re all actually united in the opinion that you’re a human being. I know that must be terrifying for you.”

They breathe for a few moments, tense. Edith is staring, unseeingly, down at her papers, waiting for Mary to say something horrid. She thinks Mary might be waiting for it to. But she can feel her sister struggling in the silence, trying to snatch something cutting from the air, and instead: “God.” Mary’s voice is strangled and fierce and Edith looks up, surprised, but Mary’s already leaving, shoulders thrown back, off to terrorise some other part of the house with the hole in her heart.

Edith goes back to her writing, but finds she can’t concentrate. Her mind is full of Mary. After a moment, she pushes her work, what she’s increasingly thinking of as her real work even though that’s absurd because it’s not what she gets paid for, away from her. She takes a new sheet of paper and she writes across the top: The Modern Widow.

Then she puts it away and feels awful for even considering it.

*

Edith lives in two places now: her study and London. Everywhere else, she just floats, drifts, sustaining herself with the knowledge that she can return to one or the other.

Michael meets her at Liverpool Street and kisses her cheek, right there in the middle of the crowd. Edith finds she doesn’t care. With a start, she realises no one else cares either. The strangers around them are fetching their luggage, organising their children, smiling at the people meeting them or wondering where their friends are, struggling with bags, blowing whistles, running for whatever they’re late for, lighting cigarettes, and each of them has a whole world inside them which Edith is really nothing to do with.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Goodness. Nothing. All of a sudden I just feel...ever so free.”

*

“Whatever you’re writing is awfully long for a piece of journalism.”

“I’ve got a lot to say about my subject.”

“Clearly. What _is_ your subject?”

Edith carefully keeps her eyes away from Mary, rereading a few sentences of what she’s written. She’s changed the title from The Modern Widow to Modern Mourning, because the focus has expanded and because it makes her feel less guilty about talking about Mary. It no longer reads quite like a childish rant petering off into a helpless whine of _I can’t do anything_ , which is something. Though not something terribly impressive.

“A modern woman.”

“Doing what?” Mary asks. Edith wishes she knew why Mary keeps inviting herself into her study like this.

“The sort of things modern women do, I suppose.”

“Good Lord, I’ve no idea how you’d know, sitting in here all day.”

“Charming. What are you doing in my study?”

“I’m talking to you, Edith,” Mary says impatiently. “Heavens, for a journalist you can be ever so unobservant.”

Edith throws down her pen and sits up with a sigh. Mary is still wearing black. She still looks like a hole in the fabric of the house. It’s shocking, seeing her like this. Mary has poured so much time and energy into keeping Downton alive, and now she’s been jolted out of place inside it, ripping out most of what she’s always conspired to nurture.

Edith thinks, anyway. She’s never sure. Mary should be simple to understand—her life revolves around society, duty, the look of the thing and never once saying the wrong thing at dinner—but somehow she escapes description. Edith knows. She’s tried, more than once. _My elder sister is very beautiful_ is as close as she’s ever gotten, and that is a million miles from the truth. The truth, lately, is what has been obsessing her. Which is why she says, rather snappishly, “Must you use journalist as an insult?”

“Isn’t it one?”

“Oh, do go and sneer at somebody else.”

Mary sighs like she’s trying to get every last bit of air out of her body and drops her hand from the bookshelf, rolling her eyes. That’s just like Mary, Edith thinks grimly, collecting all those disparate gestures and smoothing them out into something that is a perfect wrenching picture of absolute exasperation. “No one else admits I’m sneering at them.”

“Do you want me to be angry at you?”

“I want you to be something other than sorry for me.”

“You can’t provoke people into ceasing to pity you,” Edith says. “You can only do things they’ll actually admire you for. That’s the only way to make them stop. Now please get out of my room. I can’t make you feel better.”

*

God, it’s a relief to get into London. With the family fractured, people no longer have the energy to question her when she slips away; she can simply say it’s to do with the paper, and everyone is tired of arguing about that.

Perhaps if they knew that she was planning to meet a married man it would have been different. And perhaps if they knew what she had been hiding in her bag, what she’s planning on publishing, it would have been different as well. But it’s so hard to think about that when she’s sitting in a cafe with Michael, stirring sugar into her coffee with her foot resting, curiously, intimately, against the inside of his ankle. He is reading her latest work—a piece for the paper, not the longer project she’s usually bent over these days—with an endearing frown on his face, apparently entirely undisturbed by her foot being where it is, which is charming. It only ended up there by accident, anyway.

Though she does nudge him. Just once. Just to prove to herself that she can. Just to see what he'll do. His eyes snap up, his eyebrows arched, and she blushes. He smiles. “I haven’t forgotten you,” he promises. “You’re just a very compelling writer.”

“I wasn’t worried about you forgetting me,” Edith assures him, and a moment after she says so she’s shocked to realise that it’s true. 

She stares at her coffee. The realisation that he makes her believe that she’s interesting keeps her in stunned silence until he’s finished reading.

“Are you sure you want us to publish this?” he asks.

“Well,” Edith says, pulling herself out of her shock. “Well, ah...is it fit to be published?”

“Certainly. Certainly; more than fit. Edith, it’s fantastic.”

“It’s not too dark?”

“No,” Michael says firmly. “No. It is nineteen twenty two, and we have moved past that. Death isn’t stately anymore. We shan’t be simultaneously morbid and repressed ever again. If I have any say in it, and I like to think that as a journalist I do, I shan’t let it happen. _We_ shan’t let it happen. We’ll talk about death like adults.”

He’s so quietly fierce about it that Edith’s laugh makes ripples fan across the surface of her coffee. Then suddenly she puts her cup down, not feeling like she can take a sip of it, her throat clenching as something wild and proud and aching rises inside her. Her heart is thudding. She feels like she’s going to cry. She misses Matthew. She misses Mary. She misses the way things were. But she’s not afraid of this. She’s terrifyingly unafraid of all of this.

“Yes,” she says, a bit thickly, adding sugar to her coffee again, having completely forgotten that she’s already done just that. “Yes, I...gosh. I’m ever so fond of you. No—that isn’t what I mean to say; recently I’ve developed this awful horror of saying things that aren’t true, you see, because I’ve done it so often, all my life, and I want to be sure that I can still—but what I mean to say is that I love you awfully.”

There, right there in that sun-spilled cafe, he takes her hand, like love isn’t something which has to be kept secret, hinted at in the existence of marriage papers and children. His fingers are terribly warm. Nobody even looks around. They’re smiling at each other. “Let’s publish it,” Edith says. “Please, let’s publish it.”

*

“What are you doing in here?”

“I’m hiding because Papa’s just read what I’ve written for the paper and wants to know why I’m airing the family’s business out in public. And I know that you’ll read it soon and be horrified and angry with me, but at least for the time being you’ll be the same as you always are,” Edith doesn’t say. Instead, she defends, “I came to see George. I am his aunt, you know.”

“Yes, I’m aware,” Mary snaps. She looks very strange, in her harsh mourning with her child clutched to her chest. Her face is too drawn to be motherly, too angrily beautiful—but then George makes a noise which threatens tears, and Mary turns away, rocking him and shushing him. The motion makes the lines of her soften slightly, her shoulders relaxing.

Edith watches her, guilt swimming in her stomach. Mary’s silhouetted against the window, swaying with her baby in her arms as if she’s dancing. Edith wonders if the nursery is her version of Edith’s study; the place she wants to be when she’s away from it.

She’s a little startled, always, by the unexpected sweetness which Mary can give to children. It makes her feel worse. Perhaps she shouldn’t have written anything about the angry pain in Mary’s eyes and her newfound ability to bring silence anywhere she goes. Perhaps she should have written about this. But then she hasn’t seen this, and she can’t write very well about things she’s never seen. She’s a journalist, not a novelist.

How absurd, that the reason she’s missed it, this, the way Mary hugs George tighter and kisses the top of his head, is because she’s been at her desk trying to write about the truth. Slowly, Edith turns to go, feeling like she’s intruding, but Mary says, “I suppose you’d like to hold him?”

Edith isn’t actually sure. She’s not terribly good with children. She worries she’ll break them or something, or that they won’t like her. “I think you’re probably doing a better job than I would.”

“Well. I can’t exactly argue with that.”

“Can’t you?”

“No,” Mary drawls. “I know it’s shocking.” She keeps rocking George, again staying quiet until Edith doesn’t know whether the conversation is over or not. “I read your piece in the paper. Modern Mourning. Very clever.”

A sickening crack opens up in Edith’s stomach. “Oh,” she says.

“You look like a kicked spaniel,” Mary says, though she’s got her back to Edith. “Don’t be so pessimistic, Edith; it makes talking to you so awfully depressing. I’m sure Papa’s already torn you to shreds for it, so I don’t see why I should bother. You made me sound ghastly; well, perhaps I am. I should much rather be ghastly than fade away, and at least you’re convinced I won’t be doing the latter. I should have liked to see it before you showed it to the entire country, that’s all, though I appreciate the pseudonym. Oh for God’s sake, don’t be shocked. I did always say it was a good idea, you being a journalist. It’s so you; untrustworthy and honest at the same time. If I hadn’t expected something like this, I wouldn’t have let Papa let you take the job at all. Now, if you aren’t going to hold George, you’ve probably got writing to do.”

Slowly, Edith retreats, her heart thundering in her chest, unsure what’s just happened. “But you are going to have to hold him eventually,” Mary adds, again just as Edith is trying to make her escape out of the door. “I shall pardon you this time, but you _are_ his aunt.”

*

“You’d think now that the thing’s finished and the publication date’s set, there’d be nothing much more to fuss with,” Edith groans, putting down her pen and rubbing her forehead. “I can’t dedicate it to you, can I?”

It’s 1925 in London, three years since Edith wrote the first words of the book which is to be published in a few months, and the leaves outside are slowly turning golden, rattling against the window. Early morning sunlight is pouring through between them over Edith as she sits at her desk in her dressing gown. Michael is in bed, her bed, their bed, smiling at her sideways. “No. I think that might be indelicate, considering. And I don’t need it.”

“Well! I can’t think of a single person who _needs_ it.”

“Can’t you?”

*

_My elder sister is very beautiful, no matter what happens to her. She is beautiful like our house is beautiful, in that she looks best when visitors are around and is often cold in the mornings. In fact, she is by nature cold, unless someone takes the time to light a fire inside her._

_Much like our house, I don’t want to live anywhere near her, but she will always possess some little green corner of my soul which will never go away. I wasn’t born in London, after all, though I now live here quite happily. I didn’t start writing in London, either, though again, it is now the place in which I unwisely pursue a literary career, or a literary bad habit. This book started with her; it started with our house, too._

_And therefore I dedicate this book to you, M., in the hope that you will get some enjoyment out of disagreeing with everything within its pages._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Also, I haven't seen Downton since the last Christmas special. I DON'T HAVE A CLUE HOW MICHAEL ACTUALLY TALKS. If he's wildly OOC—in fact, if any of the characters are wildly OOC, which is quite possible given that I wrote this in a day and can barely remember half of what's happened on Downton—they were cloned in the night. I'll write a sequel about it.


End file.
